Dispossessed Kenyans demand compensation ahead of King Charles' visit
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[October 30, 2023]
By Aaron Ross
KERICHO, Kenya (Reuters) - When the then-Princess Elizabeth visited
Kenya in 1952, Kibore Cheruiyot Ngasura was among a group of young men
chosen to sing for her at an event near Lake Victoria.
The men planned to use the occasion to petition Elizabeth to relocate
their parents from a detention camp in the barren, mosquito-infested
town of Gwassi, where members of the Talai clan had been held for nearly
two decades on suspicion of fomenting resistance to British colonial
rule.
The event never happened. Before Elizabeth could make it to Lake
Victoria, word came that her father, King George VI, had died. The new
queen hurried back to London.
More than 70 years later, Elizabeth's son, King Charles, will visit
Kenya this week on a state visit. And Ngasura, now about 100 years old,
again has a message for the royal visitor.
"I wish to inform him that we should be compensated for the hardship
that we went through," Ngasura told Reuters outside his house, a small
wooden and iron structure on a grassy hill with two lightbulbs and no
running water.

Buckingham Palace has said Charles' visit, which begins on Tuesday, will
acknowledge "painful aspects of the UK and Kenya's shared history". The
British ruled for more than six decades before Kenyan won its
independence in 1963.
But for some communities in western Kenya's fertile highlands, the
injustices caused by British colonization are as much present-day
realities as historical memories.
A U.N. report in 2021 said more than half a million Kenyans around the
western town of Kericho suffered gross human rights violations including
unlawful killings and land expropriation during British colonial rule.
The colonial administration took hundreds of square kilometers of land
that communities in western Kenya had lived on for generations and
handed it to British settlers. Much of it became tea plantations that
today belong to multinational companies, the U.N. report said.
"Our people, most of them, are living below poverty level," said Joel
Kimetto, a representative of the Kipsigis ethnic group, of which the
Talai are one of 196 clans.
"The majority of the vast fertile lands were taken by the British and
our people were chased away to the native reserves where it is hilly,
rocky, slopey and unproductive," he said.
A spokesperson for the British government's Foreign, Commonwealth and
Development Office noted that the UK government had previously expressed
regret for abuses committed during a 1952-1960 uprising in central Kenya
against colonial rule.

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Kibore Cheruiyot Ngasura, 105, a member of the Talai community,
which accuses the British colonial government of displacing them
from their farms, pose for a picture with his sons outside his house
ahead of Britain's King Charles' and Queen Camilla's visit to Kenya,
in Tugunon village of Kericho County, Kenya October 25, 2023.
REUTERS/Monicah Mwangi

It agreed to an out-of-court settlement in 2013 to pay almost 20
million pounds to elderly Kenyans who suffered torture and abuse
during what is known by Kenyans as "the emergency" after a London
court ruled the victims could sue.
“We believe the most effective way for the UK to respond to the
wrongs of the past is to ensure that current and future generations
learn the lessons from history, and that we continue to work
together to tackle today’s challenges,” the spokesperson said in
response to questions from Reuters.
The spokesperson did not address the allegations raised by the
Kipsigis and Talai, which are separate from the abuses during the
emergency. Buckingham Palace did not respond to a request for
comment.
'NO INTENTION' TO COMPENSATE
Charles will not travel to western Kenya during his visit, which
will take him to the capital Nairobi and eastern port city of
Mombasa, according to a statement from the palace.
The British government has not been receptive in the past to
requests by the Kipsigis and Talai to discuss compensation. In 2019,
it informed the communities it had "no intention to enter any
process" to resolve the claims, according to the U.N. report.
Ngasura said he was about 12-years-old - he does not know his exact
birth date - in 1934 when the British rounded up around 700 Talais
and forced them to march for weeks to reach Gwassi.
Following protests by the young men, he and a few dozen others were
relocated in 1945 to a detention camp closer to Kericho, where they
could find wives from their community.

They were finally released in 1962, but the land where they had once
grazed their livestock and collected honey now belonged to British
settlers and tea companies.
Ngasura was able to scrape together the money to buy a small plot
from a British army captain. Today, he and his descendants who live
there survive off of a half-dozen cows and some maize crops.
It is no comparison to what he knew as a child.
"We could take cows anywhere. The land was huge," he recalled. "This
land is not big enough. Otherwise we would have kept a lot of cows
and grown coffee."
(Reporting by Aaron Ross; Additional reporting by Michael Holden in
London; Editing by Alison Williams)
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